This is a BETA TEST release -- the current status and the list of
known issues are shown here: http://luajit.org/status.html
Please report any problems you may find with this release. Thank you!

What's new in LuaJIT 2.0
------------------------

The VM of LuaJIT 2.0 has been rewritten from the ground up and is
relentlessly optimized for performance. It combines a high-speed
interpreter, written in assembler, with a state-of-the-art JIT compiler.

An innovative trace compiler is integrated with advanced, SSA-based
optimizations and a highly tuned code generation backend. This allows a
substantial reduction of the overhead associated with dynamic language
features. It's destined to break into the performance range
traditionally reserved for offline, static language compilers.

Performance on numerical code is already quite competitive (see below).
Support for other areas (e.g. string functions) is still a bit weak.
Although the VM supports all Lua language features and standard library
functions, the JIT compiler is not complete (yet) and falls back to the
interpreter in some cases. All of this works transparently, so unless
you use -jv, you'll probably never notice. The interpreter is quite
fast, too (near the performance of the LuaJIT 1.x JIT compiler).

Preliminary benchmark numbers are shown below -- performance will
likely improve during the beta test phase. These numbers are mainly
intended to give you an idea about the typical speedups you can expect,
depending on the type of application. Your mileage may vary.

Ok, so thanks to everyone for their patience! A big thank you goes to
the alpha testers. And now, please have fun with it -- Happy Halloween!

Most of the time game speed is limited by the graphics, sound and physics - all of which are provided by precompiled external libraries (SDL, OpenAL, Box2d). LuaJIT gives no benefit at all to this situation.

For the tiny fraction of lua implemented game logic that might benefit from LuaJIT, there is already a way to speed it up with the new love.native facility.

Do you mean supporting real-time rendering of any unicode glyph? Cause that's been discussed before, and it's not going to happen (at least not any time soon).
If you just need certain glyphs, you could use a bitmap font.